As with all stupid things, it started with a dare.

I dress up as a clown and let people beat me up in the alley behind the cybermotel. The first man who ever did this to me, he was my best friend.

It’s the first weekend of summer holidays and we’re piling into the backseat of Annette’s dinky old Honda headed to some house party at the far edge of town, passing a bottle of rum and coke between…

Frederick says I shouldn’t spend so much time with dead things. He warns that I, too, might atrophy and ossify.

Sophie had a fickle heart. She didn’t know at first what fickle meant—the word reminded her of tossing a coin and waiting to see which way it lands—but her mother kept using it, and her sisters…

The oddest sensation gripped me when I visited Blood Moon Market last night. It stole upon me as I paid the entrance fee—both pinkie fingernails and a lock of my thinning gray hair—and settled with cold inevitability into my stomach as I walked past the stall of Forgotten Music. I was a stranger inhabiting my […]

Content note: Child death   It was half past midnight when Olga heard the Devil cry.  They were supposed to be wild tonight, the three of them. Cassandra had led the way and Maria and Olga didn’t put up much of a fight. They would visit the Devil’s bridge—anything that claimed to be even remotely […]

So, hear nah. This is how it happen. Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and they pack up they things […]

In summer, the crack on the windowpane would align perfectly with the horizon, right around 2 p.m.

The Mountain and the Vulture by Nick Douglas   “High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been […]

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer To say that my head hurt, is to say Canis Majoris is just a big star. My probing hand felt a large knot on my forehead, and a substantial amount of warm sticky blood. Despite the pain, I managed to force open my eyes. The first thing I saw […]

Author: Aubrey Williams My job is a strange one, but it pays well, and only takes me a few hours, so I can’t complain. The company I work for— one of those powerful computer research firms, I won’t say which— has a very large office in the city. It’s the fourth-tallest skyscraper, a huge cage […]

During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always been reasonably friendly—people would take their kids around on […]

Author: Jennifer Thomas “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.” —Greeting in Amoy, one of 55 languages on the “Golden Record” sent toward interstellar space on Voyager 2, 1977 CE [Transcript: Testimony of Android 32XX, International Academy of Sciences, March 9, 2072] Ladies and […]

Damn, the exoskeleton was hot. Two minutes strapped into the smart harness with its thick exospine and the oversized, carbon-fiber limbs that grew from it, and sweat pooled between Jenna’s shoulder…

Not everything that’s missing was taken, but once it’s gone, it’s gone, ain’t it? There’s nothing to be done about it now. What isn’t dead is burned to the ground. What isn’t mourned is barely remembered.

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

I wake up to a message and a certain intuition that my first ad of the day will be for Bubble Fresh. I can almost see it, flashing through my MindzEye, just in time for me to grab a pack at the…

Author: David Barber The machine followed the edge of a shallow methane lake, picking its way between ice boulders scattered like plump cushions along the shoreline. Because it was getting near to the recovery site, the machine decided to halt for a while to upload the backlog of weather data to the satellite link in […]

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Author: Don Nigroni The Time Scope is a device that can detect knowledge about the past. This knowledge can then be converted into images and sounds by the Presenter, a special super-computer. Say you want to know who the murderer is. You could use the Time Scope to learn that the killer had dark wavy […]

Author: Bob Freeman You’re riding on a carousel. The horsey rises and falls as the carousel spins. Look! A brass ring! Grab it. Good for you! You’ve succeeded at the “grab the brass ring” level. There’s another carousel spinning counterclockwise, half-a meter above yours. Saying goodbye to your trusty steed, you step from your carousel […]

Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer Jan could taste metal, and feel the pressure and heat outside the cockpit pressing in, the latter slowly baking him inside his flight suit while the former threatened to reduce him to a single dimensionless point in space-time. He’d done what he’d never imagined possible, pushed the limits of flesh […]

Macaroni’s workstation is set up just the way he likes it. He has a little laptop with little buttons for his little golden paws, adjusted to a comfortable height. His scratch post is within easy…

Author: Alastair Millar How hard could moving be? All I needed to do was mount the antigrav plates at the corners of my unit, then hook the place up to my hex bike and haul it off to its new location. Simple, right? Except Hygeia III seems to delight in making sure that nothing’s ever […]

Author: Majoki It’s peaceful now. I can concentrate better. Even reflect a little. It hasn’t been like that in a long time. Living in a city that’s eating itself is a noisy place. Even on the calmest days at the lab, there was always the sound of far off sirens. Plaintive calls, as if from […]

I knew she was there. Lenet believed she was stealthy, and would perhaps have been correct, had I not been the cat of the Duke’s Theatre for four long years. All the sounds that grand old building could make were known to me . . . including the sound of a barefoot Cait Sidhe girl stalking the rafters like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The footsteps stopped above my head. “Rand,” Lenet hissed, voice pitched low to keep it from carrying to the audience below.